The sand had drunk so much blood it no longer darkened.
Killroy stood at the center of the arena, chest heaving, the roar of forty thousand voices breaking over him like surf against stone. His hands still remembered the weight of the blade though his mind offered no memory of raising it. The body below the neck knew things the man above it did not — how to turn a spear, how to open a throat, how to survive a war it had never been told it fought.
Above the imperial box, the banners of the Ivory Court hung motionless in the heat. Somewhere beyond them, past the walls, past the smoke of the burning quarter, something older than the empire turned in its sleep and, for the first time in an age, opened one eye.
He did not feel like a hero. Heroes, he had come to believe, were simply the ones the stories chose to keep. The rest were buried where they fell, nameless, feeding the sand.
The gate at the far end of the arena began, slowly, to rise.
And beneath his ribs — in the place where memory should have been and was not — something ancient stirred, and remembered for him.